EU: Red herrings in a sea of digital hoaxes

Category: Nachrichten
By: T. Gawlick - 2B Advice GmbH - the privacy benchmark

Chances and Risks of using Twitter as a Marketing Tool

 

Twitter is hip, cool and youthful — and ever since it was used in such a smart way by Barack Obama's election campaign, it has the aura of success too. No wonder more and more companies want to get involved in it and try to tie into their publicity their answer to the standard Twitter question: "What are you doing right now?" In principle, they're not wrong. PR specialists confirm that the 140 character message has just the right brevity to be read from beginning to end by the recipient. Since most of the Twitter messages posted are about the personal state of mind of individuals, all Tweets — even the commercial ones — have something genuine about them, and so they allow businesses to get much closer to the customer than they would through an anonymous newsletter.

 

What should not be underestimated, however, is the risk that, in theory, anyone can make contact under the name of a company and send messages that are false or even that discredit the company, since very few Twitterers take the trouble to check the validity of a message. On the contrary, the more far-fetched a message, the greater the chance that someone will pick it up and pass it on.

 

Twitter has agreed to introduce from summer 2010 validated user accounts, which are to confirm by means of a seal that the username really does belong to the person in whose name the message appears. However, verification of accounts is to be voluntary. The problem of "digital hoaxes" sent under a false name will therefore not be solved in this way.

 

The only thing left to companies is to check the Twitter cosmos for the context in which the name of their firm is being used and, if necessary, intervene to correct it.

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